New Feature: Handicap Classes

Most of the competitions Tournr helps to run are straight forward class registration, and by that I mean you register for a class and accept the T&C’s and you’re in (subject to payment etc.) but there is one type of class Tournr didn’t really deal with very well until now – Handicap Classes.

What was the problem?

Well – for a handicap class as an organiser you want to know the handicap score for each user. To get this, you generally have a set of questions and the answers to these give you a score. The main problem was that Tournr didn’t give you anywhere to put the score. Another side problem was that generally, you’d put the questions into the description which gave a disconnect between registering and working out your score (you might click ‘register’ and then have to close the form to read the questions, then re-open the form), which wasn’t good for competitors.

What’s the solution?

You can now set the class (when adding, or editing) to be a handicap class, and add in the questions (if you want to). Now when a competitor registers, they have to provide a handicap score.

Show me!

On the ‘add/edit’ screens for a class, you now have a ‘Handicap class’ checkbox:

Tick it and you get the option to add questions:

After adding the questions (if you want) save the class and when someone comes to register for it, they will see the following form:

(If you as the organiser have asked for more information, that will be there as well!) The competitor can click the ‘see questions’ link to see the handicap questions:

Then fill in their score and press ‘Register’

As an organiser – you can see the handicap score in two ways, first is by pressing the ‘View’ icon:

The second way is to download the ‘Competitors by Class’ document:

(CSV or XLS will be the same), when you open the file you will see the competitors with Handicap score (where applicable):

The ‘open’ class in this example doesn’t have a handicap, so no score entered.

Tournr Tips #9 – Payment without PayPal

I recently wrote about how to add PayPal to Tournr, but what if you don’t want to use PayPal? Prefer cheques? Prefer BACS? – Of course we can do that!

First things first – we’ve got to be logged in, then let’s head to our tournament and edit it:

Scroll to the ‘Add Payment Details’ section, and select ‘Add payment details’:

Add in your information in the ‘Notes’ field (you can use MarkDown if you want):

Lastly, ensure that the ‘Use PayPal’ check box is left off.

Then press ‘Save’

Then on the tournament page you will have a payment section:

Just a quick couple of tips for formatting the text as above, when editing your text, to get each bit on a new line put 2 spaces at the end of the preceding line. To get italics, surround what you want to be italicised with single ‘*’ characters (like *this*). To get bold, use 2 ‘*’ characters (like **this**).

New Feature – Attachments!

Tournr is designed to allow an organiser to organise a competition and have all the bits & bobs that go with it easy to fill in and then display to the competitor. But sometimes you just need that bit extra, maybe a Menu for that post competition meal, maybe a handicap form – really the options on that front are limitless!

Until now, an organiser has been limited to either copying the text of a doc and putting it into the description field, or saying something like ‘Email me for the form’. Neither of which is a good solution, as it means the organiser has to still be involved and may as well drop back to the traditional spreadsheet & email option. So let me introduce…

Attachments!

As an organiser you can now add any number of attachments to your tournament, you can make each attachment visible to everyone, competitors or even just organisers. Let me show you how.

First step is to login and go to your competition, once there, scroll down below the Description section, and you should see an Attachments section.

Pressing the ‘+’ button will take you to the ‘Add Attachment’ page:

Press ‘Browse’ and select the file you want, this will then display in the box:

You can type any description you want, this will appear next to the attachment (for those in the know – you can use MarkDown here if you want)

The next two options are who (other than the Organisers) can see the attachment:

Visible to anyone
If this is set, anyone can see the attachment. They don’t need to be logged in or a competitor.
Visible to competitors
If this is set and Visible to anyone isn’t set, then only competitors and organisers can see the attachment.

If neither of the options is selected, then only organisers can see the attachments.

We hit ‘Save’ and now we can see the attachment in the tournament:

As I’m an organiser – I can delete the attachment (using the ‘bin’ icon), and all anyone else has to is click on the name to download the file.

Limitations

File size is currently limited to 2Mb, let me know if this is an issue or you need to upload bigger.
File types are limited – this means you can’t upload .exe, .bat, .cmd etc files (and the rest of the usual suspects).

Do you come from a Country?

Good news if you do! Tournr now lets you select a country and that country’s flag will then appear next to your name!

How do you do it?

First log in to your account on Tournr.

Then go to the ‘All your settings’ page (from the top ‘Account’ menu):

Edit your personal details:

Select your country from the list:

You can pick things like Wales, Scotland, England if you want to be specific! Once you press ‘Save’ you should see your flag next to your name on the account page:

All the competitions you’ve entered will have the flag updated as well!

Paypal and YouTube/Vimeo integration

Turns out that letting anyone embed whatever they want into a webpage is a bit of a security risk, whilst it’s super handy to embed youtube / paypal etc, there is too much risk. So, as of 1pm today Tournr stopped allowing you to embed YouTube / Paypal in the way I’d previously shown.

But it’s too important to be able to use PayPal and YouTube to not have it there. So there is a solution to the problem, and hopefully it’s way better than before anyhow :) We’ll start with the two simple things, YouTube and Vimeo.

Embedding YouTube

To embed a YouTube video all you need is the identifier of the video, you can get this from the address bar of your browser when you’re looking at the video:

The bit surrounded by red in the picture, you copy that exactly (case does matter in this instance) and add it to your description by wrapping it with the tags: [yt]

For example:

[yt]kFsZo-xw9Dk[yt]

will display as:

Embedding Vimeo

Pretty much the same deal as YouTube above, the main difference is the tags are [vim] instead. The Vimeo ID is a number at the end of the url, again, in the address bar of your browser:

So,

[vim]113311298[vim]

will display as:

PayPal Integration

This is the biggest change, in the past I’ve suggested going to the PayPal website and generating a button then pasting that button into the Description field. It’s a bit of a disconnect to have to jump to PayPal to generate a button, then back to Tournr. So now, as part of competition creation (or indeed editing) you can add payment details and Tournr will automagically generate the button code for you.

So, when you come to edit or create a competition you’ll see a checkbox entitled ‘Add payment details?’, by default this is not selected, and if you don’t add any (or if you uncheck this at a later date) no payment details will be displayed on the site.

If you do check the box, all the options for payment will appear:

So let’s take this field by field:

Notes: This is text that appears above the button, allowing you to specify instructions, or (indeed if you’re not using PayPal) how to pay.

Email address for payments: The email address PayPal will send to. If you get this wrong paypal won’t accept a payment, if you get someone else’s email address – then someone else will get the payment, be extra careful with this!

Item Name / Item Code: These are codes for you to see what someone has paid for, if you leave them empty, they will be set to defaults of ‘<your competition name> Registration’

Number of classes to show: The number of classes to allow registration for on the button, if competitors can register for only 2 classes, set this to 2.

Currency: 3 options, £, € or $

Cost of registering for one class: This is the first class cost

Cost of registering for another class: This is for subsequent classes, if you leave this blank, the price of the first class will be used.

Show additional class option: This allows the paypal button to have one more option of ‘Additional Class’ which will be at the cost of registering for another class.

Additional Text Field: Use this if you want some extra detail from paying competitors (T-Shirt size for example)

Visible to unregistered competitors?: If checked, then you don’t have to be registered to be able to see the pay button.

The example picture above results in the following button:

and:

if I change the number of classes to ‘10’, I end up with this:

This removes the need to go to PayPal and generate buttons, and creates a specific ‘Payment Details’ section on your competition page, making it clearer to competitors how to pay.

New Feature – Skills – How

I recently added a new feature to Tournr – Skills Rating, you’ll notice it by a number that will appear after your name when you register, or when the results are in.

I’m going to do some more posts on how this is calculated, but in brief, everyone starts at 1000, and ratings go up/down depending on what position you come, and (most importantly) who you are competing against at the time. If you compete against a high score person and beat them, then your score will go up a larger amount than if you have a high score and beat someone with a low score.

As I said, I’ll explain it all properly on subsequent posts, but for now, this will cover how to make sure you tournament has it.

How to get Skills Ratings

First and most important is the type of the class, you need to have this set so the ratings can be calculated, your rating is on a type by type basis, so you might be an amazing chess player, but rubbish at draughts.

Here I’ve set the type to ‘Swan Peddalo Surfing’, now all I need to do is add the results for the competition:

Enter the scores (the ratings will not be calculated for anonymous competitors, nor if there is only one competitor):

The actual ratings are only calculated when the organiser finalises the competition:

The organiser confirms they want it finalised and your scores are calculated.

Here, because I was first, my rating is above 1000, the 2nd place is below 1000 (again, I will explain this better later on)

Things to note:

1. This rating will take at least 3 competitions to start to normalise to your actual rating, if you’ve only taken part in one competition, the rating will be inaccurate and won’t reflect your actual rating.

2. You need to specify a competition type.

3. Ratings are only calculated if there are 2 or more registered members, anonymous members can’t be rated mainly because of note ‘1’, we need a set of results to be able to be accurate, and we could never do that with anonymous competitors.

Introducing Multi-User (or Tournr for Families)

Some things you only learn from doing, and Tournr’s development is no different, today I’m pleased to introduce a feature I hadn’t even thought about until Tournr was used to help with the running of the Ride Surf Kayak British Championships. Multiple Users, or Tournr for families.

The problem

This first appeared when a parent tried to register two members of their family for the same competition. They created an account on Tournr and set the name to one of their children, registered them, and then ran into a wall of no-functionality. At which point they emailed me and I added them as a Non-registered competitor (see tip #1). But that is a terrible flow, it puts a mental jump between simply pressing ‘Register’ and having to now have a conversation and tell someone else the details needed to register.

Subsequently, another case arrived which was slightly different where we had one person registering a collection of others on behalf of a group / organisation.

The solution

Tournr now supports both cases with the Multi-user feature, to use it first you need to turn it on, this is as simple as logging into your account and selecting the ‘All Your Settings’ option from the Account menu:

Once there, simply press the ‘Turn ON’ button, next to the Turn on Multi-user message:

A new section will appear:

And you can add as many other users to your account as you want by pressing the ‘+ Another User’ button:

You can also edit their names, delete them from here too.

When you register for a class you get the option to now select which user you want to use:

And from here you fill in the details you need to as required by the competition. As a default the values are prefilled with the Primary users details (e.g. the parent), and the email address will always be the primary users.

Benefits

The prime benefit of doing the accounts this way, over using the ‘non-members’ approach is that the stats / positions / ranks etc are all linkable together, giving you the ability to see (soon) a history of positions, all the competitions taken part in for every user. So in 10 years time, you can look back and see how well you did.

Another benefit is that if the other user decides they want their own account, you’ll be able to migrate all of this information to their account so they don’t lose their data.

Any questions or problems, please let me know via the feedback!

Registration with Extra Details

Tournr has recently helped with the registration for the Ride Surf Kayak British Championships which has been a baptism of fire in many respects. As it stands there are 100 entries over 9 classes of competition, which is far and away the biggest event Tournr has been used for so far.

In doing so there were a couple of additions the guys at Ride wanted to be added for Tournr to be useful for them, so I’m going to introduce them to you.

Extra Registration Detail

They wanted the ability to record the BCU / CANI / WCA etc membership number of each competitor, (for the insurance of the event), Tournr initially didn’t cope with this as I’d only added email, phone and address as fields a competitor could have. The problem is that a football / scrabble / other competition isn’t going to want to have a BCU field, (they may have their own governing body though), and I didn’t want to have to restrict it to being just a ‘Governing body membership number’ field. So now we have an ‘Extra detail’ field. This can be anything you want:

When you set up your competition to have this field a competitor will see this when they register:

Which, by pressing the ‘eye’ () icon next to their name will show you all the details:

At the moment, there is only one dynamic registration field like this, there will be more at a later date.

Classes Button

Simple and should have been there from the start, but a quick way to get to the classes you want to register for is now provided by the ‘Classes’ button, to be found just under the title:

Documents

I’ve not really documented (ha!) much about these yet, as they primarily help Organisers a bit later on in the day, but in essence they provide an Excel (or plain CSV) file giving all the details of the competitors, useful for printing sign in sheets etc. I’ve also added the number of classes each competitor has entered to the ‘All Competitors List’.

New Feature: Types

Tournr has never really cared about the type of your competition, it’s quite happy to run anything with you and that is still the case today. But! If you want to give your classes types, well now you can!

This isn’t a huge feature, but it’s needed for a couple of things that are coming up that I promise you will be very nifty indeed. So, on to the show and tell.

What is a Type?

A type is a classification of your class, by the sport or game type, it can be a broad classification (e.g. Kayak) to specific (e.g. K-1 Sprint 500m) though ideally, the more concise the better.

How do I set a Type?

As always, login and go to your tournament. In there go down to your classes, and click on ‘edit’ to change the class you want to add a type to:

There is a new text box called ‘Type’, click in there and type in the name of the type you want to classify your class as.

You’ll get a loading indicator whilst Tournr searches for valid matches, and if it finds any, it will show them to you on the screen:

When you save and go back to your classes you’ll see the type next to the class name:

To remove your type, simply edit the class again and delete the type then save!

Now, of course Tournr hasn’t got every sport, not even close (in fact at the time of writing, we’ve got the Olympic Kayak / Canoe and surf classes), so what happens if the class you want isn’t listed?

Just type it in, Tournr might give you suggestion as to what it thinks you mean, but you are free to ignore it!

Results in:

These custom entries won’t show up in the Tournr suggestions initially as they need to be approved by an administrator of the site. If we’ve missed something please feel free to use the feedback link to let us know!

Why do this?

I hinted at a couple of things that I can do when I have this information, firstly (and I think pretty importantly) I’d like to be able to search by sport / game type, to be able to filter all the tournaments by type would be very handy for competitors, once you have that you can do some other things (one of which will be very soon and I don’t want to ruin the surprise).

Just to make it clear: You don’t have to set this at all, you can leave all classes without types and Tournr will work just fine, but I think it will help in the long run.

Tournr Tips #8 – PayPal

IMPORTANT NOTE!! This tip is now out of date – please see PayPal Integration to integrate PayPal.

The description part of a competition allows you to embed most things you can find on the internet. Handily this also applies to PayPal, quite often these days competitions like to take money via PayPal – there are lots of reasons, competitors can use credit cards or bank accounts to make payments and in a safe way. It also allows an organiser to manage the payments, issue refunds without having to post off a cheque. Not having to deal with Cheques is a big plus point in itself!

Generally – PayPal has 2 ways to send payments, the first is you put an email address in and ‘send’ your payment via that address, the downside to that scenario is that someone can easily mistype an email – not everyone can copy/paste (for example, reading from a phone screen whilst typing into a webpage), and some characters 0 and O (that’s ‘zero’ and the letter ‘o’) can easily be mixed up.

The second way generally seen is via the PayPal button – which is ace, as you can even go the whole hog and create a cart system.

Tournr will work equally well with both, but in this post I’m just going to show how to do the button code, as typing an email address is easy, and you already know how to do that!

To use buttons, you do need to have Premier or Business account with PayPal. This allows you to accept credit cards etc, I believe (and it’s been a long time since I’ve done it) you need to verify your account, PayPal is very good at helping you with this, so I’ll leave it to them.

If you have a premier or business account already, then we’re good to go, and we want to go to the button factory – (that link takes you to the UK version, but I imagine it will redirect to the region you are in). You have a choice of 5 button types, In principle you can embed any of them, but we’re only really interested in the ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add To Cart’ buttons. You can use either for doing most of the cases you’re going to be looking at, with you needing to do slightly more to use the ‘Cart’ button, but we’ll cross that bridge a little further down.

Buy Now

Buy Now is most appropriate for a competition with one class, or just a set entrance fee. It’s a simple one click payment option. You can also use it for multiple classes if you have a simple set up.

From the ‘button factory’ select the Create your button now link, if you’re not logged in you will be asked to.

Here you can choose a different button type (if you’ve changed your mind), but we’ll stick with the current one. The next thing to fill in is the ‘Item name’, generally, to make life easier, it’s best to stick in the name of your competition. If you regularly run the ‘British Open’ it’s worth putting the name as something like ‘British Open 2014’ so you can distinguish it from the next time you run it – you can use the Item ID for this as well, so something like BO2014 might be appropriate.

If you have only one entry, then add in the price (and choose your currency), then press Create Button. If you have more than one type of entry, let’s do some customising!

We have 2 options, a drop-down with or without prices. You’d use the without prices option if you’re looking at a single price, but multiple options – i.e. a competitor can only take part in one class. Most likely you’re looking for the option with prices.

Just fill in the payment details, and this is entirely up to you. Let’s say we allow competitors to enter up to 3 classes, the first class we charge at £10, and each subsequent class is only £5 we might setup our button to look like this:

Which results in a button like:

Next we can skip the 2nd and 3rd steps of the button factory (by all means look at them and see if there is anything you want to do – one thing that can be handy is to restrict the number of entries allowed using the ‘Track Inventory’ option).

We want to press the ‘Create Button’ button now:

Now you are taken to a page called ‘Add your button code to your webpage’ which is handy, as that’s what we want to do. You’ll see a box with a ‘Website’ tab, what you want to do is copy that code and paste it into your ‘Description’ of your competition:

(Where the red arrow is)

Which when you save will give you this on your competition page:

The competitor can now press the ‘Buy Now’ button, and PayPal deals with the rest.

Add To Cart

Add To Cart is most appropriate for a multiple-class competition, where competitors can enter in multiple classes, or where you need to have optional extras such as ‘day insurance’.

It’s a very similar process to the one above, you can decide to have one button per price point, so you might have a ‘First Class’ button where the price is £10 then a second button for subsequent classes, which is set at £5, the choice as they say is yours (though please email me if you want advice on what to do, I’ll be more than happy to help!).

In this case – you’ll add multiple buttons using the same approach as you would for the ‘Buy Now’ button. The only extra thing you need to do is create a ‘View Cart’ button, which you can see as an option at the bottom of the page when you ‘Create’ your cart button:

This doesn’t really have any options, and is a straight copy/paste job.

Tournr

Your competitions, your way

Author: tournr